1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate generally to digital still cameras, and more specifically to a digital still camera processing image frames in different formats with reduced memory requirements.
2. Related Art
Digital still cameras refer to image capture devices, which capture an image of objects in a scene upon a user action (typically referred to as clicking). Each image (thus captured or thereafter processed) is represented by digital data, and accordingly the camera is referred to as a ‘digital’ camera, and the digital data together representing a captured scene/image is referred to as an image frame. The camera is referred to as a still camera since typically a single image of a scene is captured in response to a single user action.
Digital still cameras may represent the same image frame in several formats, for example, to simplify processing. As an illustration, an image frame may be generated first in Bayer (raw) format, and several image processing operations such as auto-white balance, color filter array (CFA) interpolation, color processing, etc., may be performed on the raw image frame. The raw image frame may be converted to another format (e.g., YUV format) for image processing operations such as edge enhancement, brightness and contrast adjustments, noise filtering, efficient compression to JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format, etc. The image in the form of YUV pixel values may then be compressed (e.g., into JPEG format) for space-efficient storage and/or transmission.
There is often a need to reduce memory requirements in digital still cameras, particularly when the available memory space is limited (such as in low cost digital still cameras).